Jack the Ripper: Women of Whitechapel, ENO

The dark, dank streets and tenements of London’s notorious borough of Whitechapel in 1888 are powerfully captured by English National Opera’s production of Jack the Ripper. Composer Iain Bell has created a rich and sumptuous score with a Romantic flavour in the pulsating strings and the inclusion at crucial moments of a hammer-struck zither or psaltery which eerily evokes the tinny tone of a piano in an East End pub as well as the exotic air of some dangerous grey East European capital.

The
opera is subtitled The Women of Whitechapel and the story is told
from the victims’ point of view. Five senior sopranos portray the
murdered women. Janis Kelly sings Polly Nichols, arrested for
vagrancy and sent to the workhouse with its coffin-like beds in an
atmospheric set designed by Soutra Gilmour. With pathetic regret she
sings ‘I had a man before’, a sombre aria with chorus of fellow
outcasts from society’s jaundiced opinion of single women. Marie
McLaughlin sings with music hall joviality the popular Annie Chapman
whose death brings the persecuted sorority together behind the etched
glass of a Victorian boozer alleviating their misery in Bell’s
ironic take on the rumbustious drinking song. A sinister chorus of
top-hatted, moustachioed tenors and basses appear from the shadows of
the wings soliciting their quarry at the bar.

Drunkenly,
the Wagnerian Susan Bullock takes the stage at the start of the
second half as Elizabeth Stride, the third victim. ‘God I love a
fireman – hands like warming pans’, she lyrically drools in Emma
Jenkins’ beautifully written tragic-comic libretto. Tragedy and
comedy were neighbours at the time with the disembowellings carried
out in the shadow of the music halls. The production highlight is the
duet Bullock then sings with Lesley Garrett’s fourth victim
Catherine Eddowes arriving from a delightful scene with a
suspiciously pervy photographer, creepily sung by James Cleverton.
The Bullock-Garrett duet stands for the so-called ‘double event’,
the murder of two women in the space of an hour. The second occurred
within the precincts of the City – cue establishment panic – and
there are fine performances by Nicky Spence as the bungling bobby and
William Morgan as the Writer as police and press take serious note
for the first time.

A
protracted and surreal ending is unnecessary and spoils the opera’s
impact. A man is killed by a stampeding crowd in a scene with no
basis in truth and we are invited jarringly to sympathise with a
dying male in a plot about misogyny. Natalya Romaniw sings the final
victim Mary Kelly standing in her coffin draped in the white of
innocence, achieving apotheosis in her soaring angelic soprano. A
heavy hand guides the final pages. This is a shame because the work
as a whole provides a gripping evening of tension and suspense
relieved by comic interludes and a wonderfully lyrical score. The
performance here benefits from five of the nation’s finest
sopranos, women of international standing singing for the loss of
five others who were never so lucky.